Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  When it happened, Buddy was climbing out, hanging on the rope maybe forty feet from the top of the pit. Burt Grossman was on the other rope, about five feet from Buddy. Suddenly, everyone up top started yelling, "Rock, rock, rock!" But when Burt looked up, it wasn't a rock at all; it was a big tree limb, about the size of a fullback's thigh, and it was coming down the pit, getting bigger real fast, like a 3-D movie. It hit the wall, flipped over, and one end nailed Buddy in the face.

  It was Burt's first big pit, and when he glanced over at his instructor, the guy who was supposed to save him if something went wrong, the whole lower half of the guy's face was blood, and his upper lip was . . . gone. Buddy shouted something that sounded like "Clisssshhh."

  "I was trying," Buddy explained at dinner, "to say 'climb.' We didn't know what else was coming down, maybe the whole tree was going to come down, and we needed to get out of there. It's just, you can't say m and b with no upper lip."

  "So he's, zoom, up the rope," Burt told the editor. "I'm hanging there thinking, Well, this sure is a lot of fun. I'm dead."

  "But you weren't scared," the writer pointed out.

  "Oh, no. This seemed real normal to me. Hang from a rope above a haunted pit full of poisonous snakes, and trees fall out of the sky on you. Normal day in Tennessee."

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  "So what happened after you climbed out of the pit?" the writer asked.

  Burt said, "I get to the top, people are talking about, let's go back down into the pit, see if we can find Buddy's lip. And this caver up top, he's a third-year medical student, he says, 'No, Buddy's lip is all here. He just severed some muscles, the other muscles pulled it apart,' and that's why Buddy looked like the damn elephant man. And I was amazed. Really amazed that a guy smart enough to be in medical school, man, he would do something like this."

  Burt climbs out of the pit alone. One of the cavers up top has already driven Buddy to the hospital, so Burt gets to ride back to his motel in Trick's truck. Later, at the motel, the writer calls, says that Burt can do what he wants, call the whole thing off.

  "Hell no," Burt says. "Show me the Rambo pit. Take me to the bat cave. I want to see Grandpa Munster hanging upside down."

  So the next day, the cavers act as if Burt is one of them. Because it's Monday, a workday, there's only four of them now: the writer, the photographer, Trick, and Roger Ling. They all seem real happy that Burt didn't go home when he had the chance. They gear him up with knee pads, elbow pads, leather gloves, and a helmet with a light on it. The place is a commercial cave. You walk through a store where they sell Dr Pepper and Moon Pies right into a big underground room with stone icicles that hang down and ones that stick up out of the floor. Hidden lights— green and red—illuminate the formations. It looks like a room in a porno motel in hell.

  Burt gets the idea that they're taking him on a real easy cave walk, but ten minutes later they're out of the lit-up commercial part of the cave, and Burt's crawling on his hands and knees. It's pretty obvious no one goes beyond the motel-room part of the cave. No one but cavers. The light on his helmet is on, and all he can see is the backside of the guy crawling in front of him. Burt feels like a quarterback.

  And he has to squeeze through holes and crawl along this ledge that's like the ledge on the outside of building, that narrow, ex-

  cept that it's dark in the cave, and the ledge is muddy, and there's a drop of forty feet to some sharp rocks below. The cavers seem relieved when Burt gets to the end of this narrow crawl.

  "That's Death Ledge," Trick says. In the light from Burt's headlamp he can see the words come out of Trick's mouth in little puffs of fog. "Sometimes people freeze up on Death Ledge."

  Way past Death Ledge and beyond Danger Canyon, they all stop to rest in a little room. Everyone turns his headlamp off to save batteries. Stick says the cave goes on for miles. There's the big commercial room, then miles of wild cave. Stick says this as if he expects Burt to stand up and shout "Whoopee."

  Funny thing though: Burt realizes he isn't afraid of the dark at all. These are pretty much okay guys, and Burt gets the idea that they've decided not to throw him off of one of the forty-story pits because his first experience was such a bummer. They don't come right out and say that, though. In fact, no mention is made of pits at all.

  And the deal is, you can sit in the dark with these guys and talk. If anyone got hurt, they'd get him out. It's a kind of team, and Burt understands teams. In the dark you can't see anyone's face, and maybe that makes it easier to talk too.

  "Burt, yesterday, before the pit, you were yawning. Does this bore you?" The writer's asking a serious question.

  "No," Burt answers. "That's me, I guess. My girlfriend says that too. Says she never knows what I'm thinking. And before a game, I like to lie down on the bench by my locker. And I yawn. I bet I yawn forty times in the hour before the game. My teammates used to get on me about it, but then they saw that it works for me, that I produce." Usually, when people ask Burt about football, he tells them that he gets paid big-time, and that's why he plays. In the dark Burt heard himself actually talking about football. Saying un-Burtlike stuff, like how he loves the game, the mystical part of it.

  "I might look big compared to the average guy," Burt says, "but for a defensive end, I'm really small, six-six, two-seventy. And there's guys that can bench a lot more. ..."

  "But you do a four-point-six forty," the writer says.

  "There are guys that are quicker."

  There was a long silence, and then Burt heard himself getting all transcendental. "There's like a trance you get into. I don't know how to explain it. I don't hear the crowd, and I don't really look at anything in particular. I can see how they're lined up, and I might glance at the quarterback. I might see how my guy's got his feet set. Check his hands, maybe. But you can't plan anything: Every time you plan something out, it doesn't work. So I'm a counterpuncher. They do something; I react. There's no time to think about it. They say I'm a smart player, but what I do isn't really like thinking. It's a flow you get into. A trance."

  "What about fear?" the writer asks. Does Burt use fear to psyche himself up for games?

  "No. I mean, that's why this is sort of a stupid idea for an article. Football: What's there to be afraid of? It's a sunny afternoon, there're seventy thousand people watching you. Here, in the cave, you've got every fear known to man. Darkness, drowning, falling, freezing to death. I mean, nobody I know would enjoy this. I'm never going into a cave again. Ever."

  Next day Burt's wading through waist-deep water in a cold cave with a river running through it, and he's working hard enough that steam is actually rising off the part of his body that isn't under water. The same four guys are trudging along with him, and he's telling them that he wants to go "back to San Diego where people drive actual cars and don't live in houses made out of old beer cans." They're all laughing. Like they don't believe him. Like these cave guys actually think he enjoys this.

  They're walking through a round passage with a four-foot-wide shallow river running through it. The water is milky greenish blue, and the passage echoes with curses and laughter. You can see the helmet lights swaying in the dark. It's like those movies where the cops are chasing some serial killer through the sewers.

  Burt's thinking aloud. What if you shrunk a guy down to, like, the size of a pinhead? He could rappel down a normal person's throat on a length of sewing thread. Ha. And instead of trees, you

  could have little pieces of crackers come bombing down him. Cracker bombs.

  The cavers are laughing. Trick explains that, after a while, caves tend to make you silly. "Yeah," the writer agrees, "caves sure do snap the thread of linear thought."

  And maybe Burt's getting a little used to the caves. The passage, for instance, finally opens up above, and there are these striated, curving walls, all yellow and orange. It's a canyon. Like a little Grand Canyon, only underground, with a milky blue-green river running through it. On one ledge that sticks out overhead the
re are about fifty bats hanging upside down. With their wings folded, they look like little mice. Burt passes under them, and a couple take off for the entrance. Trick and Roger behind him duck and wave their arms around, just the way anybody else would. These guys have stickers on their trucks— bats need friends too —but they're human beings. Human beings don't like flying rodents in their faces.

  And there's a stalactite ahead of him. Burt has learned that stalactites hang "tight" to the ceiling. It's a little thing, two inches long, about as big around as a pencil, and there is a silver drop of water hanging from its tip. "How long does it take to make one of these?" Burt asks.

  "Some people say about an inch a century," Roger Ling says.

  Burt touches the formation with a big finger, touches it the way you might touch a newborn kitten. "You mean this thing is two hundred years old?"

  And they give him the lecture for about the seven-hundredth time: how caves are fragile, and people have to be educated about the beauties and the dangers; they tell him about what a pain it is to have to pull dead people out of the caves on rescue missions. Dead people really gripe the cavers if they died because they didn't educate themselves about the beauties and the dangers. . . .

  This lecture goes on and on.

  Burt's thinking about the eraser. Yesterday, sitting deep in the wild part of the cave, he felt this strange rock and dug it up. It turned out to be a pencil eraser. He thought he was going where

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  no man had gone before, and he finds an eraser. It was aggravating. Burt understands why the cavers always pick up trash and carry it out of the caves.

  "Hey, Trick," Burt calls, "you spray-painting your name on the wall again?"

  Which is the last thing cave dorks would do. They treat a cave like a church, and won't even take a leak inside one. World's biggest bladders, man.

  And, in a way, it's almost sweet. The cavers want him to like their caves. Burt, natch, is not going to do anything anyone really wants him to do. It's not his way.

  Trick and Roger are up ahead, setting up a photo and leaving Burt alone for a moment. There's a pool that is greenish blue in the light, and above it the underground river flows down over a series of rocky stair steps, bubbling up at the narrow spots. Above him there are horizontal ledges coming off both walls: ledges like giant stone platters. Hobbit seats. Stalactites everywhere. And colors. Real subtle, but they stand out after being in the cave awhile: orange and yellow and strange glowing green. It's like an elf garden or something: a real pretty grotto.

  Burt motions for the writer. "Hey, look at that."

  The writer stares at it for a long time; then he turns around with a big smile on his face. As if he caught Burt.

  "Hey. I don't appreciate this," Burt says gruffly. "Just thought I'd show it to someone who might."

  And the writer's like, Uh-huh, sure Burt.

  Later everyone's sitting in the dark, and no one's saying anything. In a few hours they'll be done, have dinner in a restaurant, and Burt can go home the next morning. He's thinking, Nobody is going to believe this. No one would believe the pit or the underground river. Or Trick, man. The guy's getting paid to help the photographer, and he's going to donate part of the money he's making to the National Speleological Society. Let them use it for education, use it to clean up trash in caves. Trick lives in a converted school bus with his wife. The guy lives in a school bus and wants to throw his money into a hole in the ground. It's not Burt's way, but he kinda admires Trick, Trick's way.

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS ▲ 336

  Caves, man. Sit in the dark and let the linear thread snap, think about the things that people love. Why they love them. Sit in the dark and think, Why me? Like maybe there was a reason.

  It was nearly five thousand years ago, in the Diyala region of Sumer, when some Iacocca type improved the performance characteristics of his oxen-driven plow by getting rid of the plow and yoking his team up to a platform on wheels. The new vehicle— the first chariot—was a novel source of fun for a couple of centuries until people began to realize that these chariots would go no faster than an ox could lumber. About 2500 B.C., folks began importing onagers—wild asses—from western India and yoking them up to the new chariots. The history of the chariot from that time onward has been a steady quest for speed. There have been, over the years, quite a few of these wild-ass innovations.

  As horses became domesticated, around 2000 B.C., they took the place of the asses. About that time, somebody invented the spoked wheel, which was a lot faster and safer than rounds cut off logs.

  In the next thousand or so years the use of chariots spread to China, India, Greece, Rome, and the British Isles. British and Celtic chariots used against the Romans in battle had swords extending from their axles for a fast, nasty run through enemy infantry ranks.

  Charioteering, in the ancient world, was a soldier's survival skill, and like many such skills, it became a sport in times of peace. The earliest description of a chariot race for sport can be found in Homer. These races were the most popular event in the ancient Olympic Games, and the chariots actually drew more people to the Roman Public Games than gladiators.

  The Roman chariot race held at the Circus Maximus usually pitted four 2-horse teams against one another for a seven-lap race. Since the horses were bred for speed, and the chariots were constructed as lightly as possible, there were a lot of exciting wrecks at the races. Chariots flew into pieces at the slightest contact, and drivers, wrapped in their own reins, were often dragged to death in front of the cheering spectators.

  Successful charioteers—the ones who always managed to keep the wheels under them as they ran the Circus—became some of the most well-known and popular men in Rome. In later years, there were four racing organizations—red, green, blue, white—

  and since there were few opportunities for commercial endorsements back in the second century a.d., the teams backed and were associated with political and/or religious positions. The later greens, for instance, embraced Monophysitism, and were despised by the blues, who considered them heretics. It was a bad day for Monophysitism as a whole when the blues beat the greens.

  There are a lot of theories about the decline of Rome, but I think that when a society comes to believe that Universal Meaning is to be derived from the results of a chariot race, then some important intellectual bulb has burned out. While the blues disputed the greens in some pretty fast theological races, the civilized world entered a dark age, and all its chariots, the fast and the philosophical, were piled up onto the scrap heap of history.

  It was well over a thousand years before anyone ever thought to race chariots again, and when it happened, not a soul in miles figured it had anything at all to do with Monophysitism.

  There's some controversy about exactly when and where the sport was revived. Some think Wyoming, some Idaho or Nevada. Most of today's racers know of chariot races that took place in the 1920s. As Hart Grover, who sometimes races for the Rexburg Idaho Upper Valley Chariot Racing Club, says, "it probably started when fellows brought their feed teams to town." Rocky Mountain winters can be rough on cattle, and when the snow gets too deep for them to find feed, the rancher is obligated to get hay out into the winter fields any way he can. A feed team usually consists of two big draft horses yoked up to a heavy wagon full of hay.

  "Up in Driggs, Idaho," Grover said, "these fellows and their feed teams would meet on the way into town and just naturally fall to racing down Main Street. First organized race I ever saw, the two guys were having an awful lot of trouble getting started, and when they got to the finish line, they both bailed out and went to fighting. I always thought when I was a kid that the finish-line fight was a part of the race."

  Cal Murdock, of the Rexburg club, agrees with Grover about

  the sport's modern origin. "My dad used to race the big hayracks we brought to town. It got to be a regular thing in the winter carnival in Victor, Idaho. There'd be dogsled races and horse pulls. Carnival s
tuff: all in good fun. Thing of it is, the hayrack races starting getting a little more serious. Guys started breeding their draft horses down to quarterhorses and thoroughbreds. They'd bring a finer breed, a faster horse, to town. Then they stopped using hayracks and started using sleighs, cutters. Pretty soon guys were making their own sleighs, real light racing cutters, specially built for speed. Well, it generated a lot of interest, and soon enough there were clubs and associations."

  Only a few teams run sleighs anymore. Chariot racing is still a winter sport, but conditions vary from bare frozen tracks to packed snow or glare ice, and most racers have found wheeled chariots the best compromise for all conditions.

  Unlike the Roman event, modern two-horse chariot teams generally race one-on-one. The approved distance is a quarter of a mile, "because," Cal Murdock explains, "we have to run in some below-zero weather, and the vets say a horse won't freeze its lungs at a quarter of a mile or under."

  These days there are chariot-racing clubs in eight western states, where the races are run on most winter weekends.

  The first race of the 1988 season was held in Bozeman, Montana, not far from where I live. It was early for the chariots—November—and the track was greasy with a thick, cold, clinging mud. The horses threw big clots of semiliquid goo back onto the drivers, so that men finished the quarter-mile looking like failed mud wrestlers. Each race, the two chariots would come thundering up on the finish line, and you could sense that, with the glop streaming off their faces like something out of a horror film, these guys couldn't see much past the reins in their hands. Just past the finish, the drivers leaned back hard, pulling the horses into a somewhat slower gallop, and outriders—men mounted on fast saddle horses—helped some of the drivers to stop.